Solana’s Clockwork will close a year after obtaining $4 million in a seed round headed by Multicoin Capital.
Clockwork, a Solana-based smart contract automation project, plans to shut down essential infrastructure for the protocol at the end of October, citing “limited commercial upside.”
Clockwork’s founder Nick Garfield said in a series of X (Twitter) tweets on August 27 that he and the team would stop actively developing the protocol and turn off all of its nodes on the devnet and mainnet on October 31.
Garfield said the team discontinued Clockwork due to “simple opportunity cost” since there were minimal commercial benefits to continuing its development and they were interested in other alternatives.
Clockwork lets users plan Solana network transactions and develop smart contracts that activate applications when triggered by events. Garfield provided his “full endorsement to fork and ship” to anyone who wants to continue working on Clockwork’s code.
Developers may continue to use the software as written, but we will shut down our nodes on devnet and mainnet as of Oct 31.
The on-chain programs will be frozen, and the code will remain open-source and free to fork on GitHub.
2/
— Nicholas Garfield (@time_composer) August 27, 2023
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Clockwork raised $4 million in a seed round headed by Multicoin Capital, Asymmetric, and Solana Ventures in August, according to Crunchbase.
X user asked Garfield if the seed money would be returned to investors. Garfield said it still has a meaningful portion but will take time “before deciding one way or the other.”
Tough Q but just curious, if there's any money remaining from the seed round, will that be returned to investors and be written off as a loss?
— tracy 🦀🗡 (@tracy_codes) August 27, 2023
The shutdown of Clockwork follows the suspension of other Solana protocols, including the decentralized finance (DeFi) network Friktion in January and its peer Everlend Finance about a month later.
The Solana-based nonfungible token (NFT) system Cardinal announced in late June that it was closing down due to the state of the economy after raising $4.4 million roughly a year earlier.